This wavering look was the look
of a dog who had been an outcast for weeks, or who had been shut up with
a chain about his throat; one who had received only kicks and cuffs for
pats of tenderness--a cringing, pleading look ready to crouch beneath
some fresh cruelty.
This look, as the trial went on and the buzzard of an attorney flapped
out his denunciations, deepened to an expression of abject fear. In
trying to answer the questions hurled at him, he would stroke his
parched throat mechanically with his long fingers as if to help the
syllables free themselves. In listening to the witnesses he would curve
his body forward, one skinny hand cupped behind his ear, his jaw
dropping slowly, revealing the white line of the lips above the
straggling beard. Now and then as he searched the eyes of the jury there
would flash out from his own the same baffled, anxious look that comes
into dear old Joe Jefferson's face when he stops half-way up the
mountain and peers anxiously into the eyes of the gnomes who have stolen
out of the darkness and are grouping themselves silently about him--a
look expressing one moment his desire to please and the next his anxiety
to escape.
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